L'Artisan Middle-East Enamel

L'Artisan Middle-East

Dear friends,

This one came from the sky.

Long before there was a watch, before there was a dial, before there was even an idea, there was a piece of iron drifting through space. It formed in the heart of an asteroid roughly four and a half billion years ago, slowly, atom by atom, in a cold and silent place. Then one day it fell to Earth.

That piece of iron is the dial of this watch.

A metal you cannot make

When you slice a meteorite like this and treat the surface, something appears that no factory can produce. A lattice of fine crystalline lines running in every direction, the Widmanstätten pattern. It takes millions of years of incredibly slow cooling to form. It is the fingerprint of deep space, and it is the reason no two of these dials will ever be the same. The metal already had its character long before it reached my bench. My job was simply to listen to it.

The map

Onto this surface I laser-engraved the map of the Middle East. Every coastline, every border, the full shape of a region that has come to mean a great deal to me through the people I have met and the trust they have placed in L'Artisan.

The engraving is precise where it needs to be precise. A region this old, this important, deserved nothing less than exactness.

The seas, by hand

Everything else, I did by hand.

I filled every sea around the map with deep blue enamel, applied slowly, one body of water at a time. The Gulf. The Red Sea. The Mediterranean edge. The Arabian Sea. And into that blue I mixed flakes of mother of pearl.

The reason is simple. Water is never still, and it is never one colour. So I wanted these seas to move the way real water moves. Tilt the watch and the flakes catch the light. They shimmer, they scatter, they shift from one angle to the next. A small piece of the sky, folded back into the sea, on a dial that came from the sky to begin with.

It is slow work. It is the kind of detail you might not notice at first, and then can never stop noticing.

Worn, not displayed

The case is 38mm stainless steel, the same honest proportions as everything I make, built for a wrist and not for a vitrine. A domed sapphire crystal sits over the dial, and a sapphire caseback lets you watch the movement turn. The hands are white and clean, so they tell the time without ever getting in the way of what lies beneath them.

The strap is warm cognac leather. Earth tones, for a watch that holds both the ground and the heavens.

This is one of the most involved pieces I have ever made. Space gave me the metal. The rest, the map and the seas and the light caught inside them, I gave back by hand.

I hope it finds the wrist it was meant for.

Warmly,
Arnaud, Founder

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Specifications

Case — 38 mm stainless steel
Crystal — Domed sapphire crystal
Dial — Genuine iron meteorite, approx. 4.5 billion years old · Natural Widmanstätten structure · Laser-engraved map of the Middle East · Hand-filled blue enamel seas with mother of pearl flakes
Hands — White
Movement — HZ5000A micro-rotor automatic · 28,800 bph (4 Hz) · 42-hour power reserve
Caseback — Sapphire exhibition caseback
Strap — Cognac leather · L'Artisan signed buckle

Specifications
Case — 38 mm stainless steel

Crystal — Domed sapphire crystal

Dial — Genuine iron meteorite, approx. 4.5 billion years old · Natural Widmanstätten structure · Laser-engraved map of the Middle East · Hand-filled blue enamel seas with mother of pearl flakes

Hands — White

Movement — HZ5000A micro-rotor automatic · 28,800 bph (4 Hz) · 42-hour power reserve

Caseback — Sapphire exhibition caseback

Strap — Cognac leather · L'Artisan signed buckle

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